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MORNING STAR

by H. Rider Haggard

DEDICATION

My dear Budge,

Only a friendship extending over many years emboldened me, an amateur,
to propose to dedicate a Romance of Old Egypt to you, one of the world's
masters of the language and lore of the great people who in these
latter days arise from their holy tombs to instruct us in the secrets of
history and faith.

With doubt I submitted to you this story, asking whether you wished
to accept pages that could not, I feared, be free from error, and with
surprise in due course I read, among other kind things, your advice to
me to "leave it exactly as it is." So I take you at your word, although
I can scarcely think that in paths so remote and difficult I have not
sometimes gone astray.

Whatever may be the shortcomings, therefore, that your kindness has
concealed from me, since this tale was so fortunate as to please and
interest you, its first critic, I offer it to you as an earnest of my
respect for your learning and your labours.

Very sincerely yours,

H. Rider Haggard.

Ditchingham.

To Doctor Wallis Budge,

Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, British Museum.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

It may be thought that even in a story of Old Egypt to represent a "Ka"
or "Double" as remaining in active occupation of a throne, while the
owner of the said "Double" goes upon a long journey and achieves sundry
adventures, is, in fact, to take a liberty with Doubles. Yet I believe
that this is scarcely the case. The Ka or Double which Wiedermann
aptly calls the "Personality within the Person" appears, according to
Egyptian theory, to have had an existence of its own. It did not die
when the body died, for it was immortal and awaited the resurrection
of that body, with which, henceforth, it would be reunited and dwell
eternally. To quote Wiedermann again, "The Ka could live without the
body, but the body could not live without the Ka . . . . . it was
material in just the same was as the body itself." Also, it would seem
that in certain ways it was superior to and more powerful than the body,
since the Egyptian monarchs are often represented as making offerings to
their own Kas as though these were gods. Again, in the story of "Setna
and the Magic Book," translated by Maspero and by Mr. Flinders Petrie
in his "Egyptian Tales," the Ka plays a very distinct part of its own.
Thus the husband is buried at Memphis and the wife in Koptos, yet the
Ka of the wife goes to live in her husband's tomb hundreds of miles
away, and converses with the prince who comes to steal the magic book.

Although I know no actual precedent for it, in the case of a
particularly powerful Double, such as was given in this romance to Queen
Neter Tua by her spiritual father, Amen, the greatest of the Egyptian
gods, it seems, therefore, legitimate to suppose that, in order to save
her from the abomination of a forced marriage with her uncle and her
father's murderer, the Ka would be allowed to anticipate matters a
little, and to play the part recorded in these pages.

It must not be understood, however, that the fact of marriage with an
uncle would have shocked the Egyptian mind, since these people, and
especially their royal Houses, made a habit of wedding their own
brothers and sisters, as in this tale Mermes wed his half sister Asti.

I may add that there is authority for the magic waxen image which the
sorcerer Kaku and his accomplice used to bewitch Pharaoh. In the days of
Rameses III., over three thousand years ago, a plot was made to murder
the king in pursuance of which such images were used. "Gods of wax . .
. . . . for enfeebling the limbs of people," which were "great crimes of
death, the great abomination of the land." Also a certain "magic roll"
was brought into play which enabled its user to "employ the magic powers
of the gods."

Still, the end of these wizards was not encouraging to others, for they
were found guilty and obliged to take their own lives.

But even if I am held to have stretched the prerogative of the Ka ,
or of the waxen image which, by the way, has survived almost to our own
time, and in West Africa, as a fetish, is still pierced with pins or
nails, I can urge in excuse that I have tried, so far as a modern may,
to reproduce something of the atmosphere and colour of Old Egypt, as
it has appeared to a traveller in that country and a student of its
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